“The overall focus of the engagement has been to cut overall IT costs over a period of time, while at the same time giving the company the ability to scale quickly should it need to do so.”
Renewable Energy
Mainstream Renewable Power required an IT partner to deliver a multi-year Microsoft cloud and digital services programme.
Mainstream were using a heavily customized version of SharePoint 2007 for managing projects and for managing documents across the company. The system had become slow and outdated. It needed a complete overhaul to ensure it did not hinder the rapid growth of the business.
Mainstream approached Auxilion with the requirement to migrate them from SharePoint 2007 on premise to SharePoint Online. This would allow Mainstream to take advantage of their existing Office 365 licenses while exploiting the new functionality within SharePoint Online.
Following a series of design workshops with Mainstream, it became clear that the best approach was to break the work into phases. This meant looking initially at the high-level architecture and site collections and then focusing in on specific projects and the corresponding site templates, workflows and data. For Phase 2 we looked at departments.
Many companies fail to place enough importance on governance when it comes to SharePoint. That did not happen in this case. Auxilion and Mainstream agreed on the need for strict governance from day one to ensure the new SharePoint Online environment did not fall into that trap. For example, we implemented workflows to automatically name documents so that they could be easily identified and tracked.
Mainstream used the migration as an opportunity to review the data in their current environment and only moved files/data that were needed. The rest was archived. This helped to ensure the new environment was kept clean, lightweight and current.
Mainstream were keen to restrict using custom code to make the system easier to maintain and support. At times creativity was required when providing solutions that avoided custom code. While this was challenging, Auxilion’s team managed to meet the Mainstream requirements without the use of custom code.
For the migration of data, Auxilion moved a small amount but then provided training on how Mainstream staff could migrate the rest. This gave control to Mainstream to pick and choose what needed to be migrated and what didn’t, with Auxilion providing support when necessary.
The benefits, which were evident almost instantly, included:
“Auxilion helped us through an important and complex transition. They identified creative, effective solutions to challenging problems and provided constant support.”
